1. Field of the Invention
The present invention in its disclosed embodiments is related generally to customer relationship management (CRM), and more particularly to a system, methods, and computer program products for managing prospective customers or “leads.”
2. Statement of the Prior Art
According to the Harvard Business Review, firms that contacted potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead as those that contacted the customer an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. Despite these findings, 63 percent of companies failed to respond in that golden hour. Twenty-four percent waited more than a day, and 23 percent didn't respond at all.
Various systems, methods, and computer program products for “call tracking” (i.e., the counting and gathering of marketing data on incoming phone calls that have been generated by a website) are known in the prior art. Such systems, methods, and computer program products have typically been designed for the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO), assessing a user's return on investment in a pay-per-click (PPC) environment, lead generation, direct marketing, and others.
Notwithstanding these developments, none of the voice-based marketing automation applications according to the prior art has enabled companies to convert more leads into sales. Web analytics solutions according to the prior art have also not provided a way to track phone calls by how they got to a given website.